Salut! Soundings

Contact Colin Randall

Making a point

Driving around Abu Dhabi, it is relatively unusual for the car driver to feel any great empathy with the people sitting behind tinted glass at the wheels of 4x4 monsters.

If I didn't like them when as Kensington Tractors or 16th Arrondissement Juggernauts, I am not about to develop a grudging fondness here.

Maybe I am stuck with the view expressed in a piece some months ago, when I wrote that drivers were probably no worse in Abu Dhabi than in many other places I have been as resident or visitor.

But rather a lot of expats do bring the worst-case road practices of their own countries and apply them to the bigger vehicles they can afford to run with fuel so cheap and no income tax to pay.

Is it just me? Or are 4x4 drivers in the UAE really the ones least likely to signal, unless the wrong way or after completing the manoeuvre, most likely to cut across three lanes at the last second to turn left at traffic lights and racing certs to zig-zag with criminal recklessness on the Dubai-Abu Dhabi highway?

And yet, Salut! favours fair play, so let me declare myself 100 per cent on the side of the man or woman who reacted to someone nicking his/her parking space by plonking his/her lorry-shaped specimen so close behind that the offending saloon driver has no escape, only the need to make humiliating entreaties to the wounded colleague.

Comments

Driving around Abu Dhabi, it is relatively unusual for the car driver to feel any great empathy with the people sitting behind tinted glass at the wheels of 4x4 monsters.

If I didn't like them when as Kensington Tractors or 16th Arrondissement Juggernauts, I am not about to develop a grudging fondness here.

Maybe I am stuck with the view expressed in a piece some months ago, when I wrote that drivers were probably no worse in Abu Dhabi than in many other places I have been as resident or visitor.

But rather a lot of expats do bring the worst-case road practices of their own countries and apply them to the bigger vehicles they can afford to run with fuel so cheap and no income tax to pay.

Is it just me? Or are 4x4 drivers in the UAE really the ones least likely to signal, unless the wrong way or after completing the manoeuvre, most likely to cut across three lanes at the last second to turn left at traffic lights and racing certs to zig-zag with criminal recklessness on the Dubai-Abu Dhabi highway?

And yet, Salut! favours fair play, so let me declare myself 100 per cent on the side of the man or woman who reacted to someone nicking his/her parking space by plonking his/her lorry-shaped specimen so close behind that the offending saloon driver has no escape, only the need to make humiliating entreaties to the wounded colleague.